Digging for treasure

My miniature life has taken on a completely new turn since I read books by Patricia King. As you may have noticed, I like recycling, and her books are all about making dollhouse furniture and other stuff from trash. Her favourite trash is junk jewellery with which she decorates everything, with splendid results. My tallboy makeover was inspired by her, but it was just the beginning. I thought I'd go to a carboot sale and see whether I could find anything useful, but instead I went on ebay. And got stuck! They sell junk jewellery by the kilo. I bought a bundle, for 99p plus postage, and it arrived this morning. I am working from home today so I could hardly wait to open it.

I am sure you can see that it is Ali Baba's cave, but it may not be immediately obvious what all these things can be used for. Decorating furniture, of course; tables, platters, bowls, frames, ornaments. And you can never have too many chains. Quite a lot will probably be useless, but even if I just use clasps and links it's a bargain.

It took me half an hour to make a few things or at least figure out what to do with them. Can you see which things from the picture above I have used?

Tables, easy. Just glue the large round pins onto chess pieces. Victorian houses are full of occasional tables. The round white apple will make a good teapot, and I have found a handle for it so all I need it a spout. The oval half-frame will be an excellent top piece for a hall mirror stand. Three bracelet links have become heavy platters for the Tudor house. Three more pins, turned upside down: platter, fruit bowl, fish pan. The red plastic pin can probably go up on a wall as it is, an oriental panel. Frames, two large and one tiny. I had to remove stones from them. (There are more in the bundle). A small oval piece fits well on one of my clocks. You can't see it well, but one piece, just above the frame, is a deer-head trophy, which will go right onto the wall in the Victorian house. The shell-shaped earring will make a perfect sconce. Two very elaborate handles, for a future bookcase perhaps? The round filigree pin will be great for allmost anything, and the big silver earring I think will look great on the Tudor bed headboard.

And I haven't even started yet, so watch this space.

I have also bought four fans. Patricia King uses fans to make fancy tables from the plastic bits. I will test it during the weekend.

chest makeover

After the first serious attempt to tranform cheap furniture, I felt much more confident and started on another chest of drawers. I will not describe the whole procedure, because it was exactly the same:

What I will describe is how I made the finishing details. The simplest would of course be to do exactly the same again, but, firstly, I only had three more chain links, and secondly, I always want to try new methods. I am now in the mode of finding tiny details, because I think it looks neater. I am not very good at cutting, shaping and molding. It was all fine seven years ago when I was a beginner, but I have higher demands on my skills now. So I rummaged through my "Very Useful Boxes" (honestly, this is what they are called at Staples) looking for teeny-tiny things I could use for handles. What I found was an old watch bracelet someone gave me a long time ago.

 

I couldn't find any use for it, but knew one day it would come handy, and it did. It was quite a lot of work to take it apart, but the shape of the links was just right. For locks, I took the upper part of a press stud - I had to paint it to match the handles. I also found three tiny keys that fit in prefectly.

The chest is now replacing its predecessor of seven years ago. 

The problem is of course that when you replace a piece with a more elegant one, all the other, non-elegant furniture looks crude. I must make a new writing desk (and I know exactly how), and I must make a new bookcase (not sure how, but will investigare). It feels sad to throw away things that I made in the very beginning of my miniature-making; it almost feels like betrayal. But I guess this is what you do with your 1:1 life as well: successively replace old things with new.

For the moment, I put in the old chest into my antique shop roombox and arranged a row of vases on it. It serves the purpose well.

Tallboy makeover

My most recent expedition to Poundland yielded a bundle of chests and tallboys. As with other Poundland furniture, they are fine, but dull, just begging to be transformed. And it so happens that I have just bought four wonderful books by Patricia King on dollhouse furniture-making (highly recommended) from which I borrowed some ideas. Here is the point of departure:

The first thing I did was sandpaper all the rough surfaces and edges. As you see, there were two handles missing, but I removed all of them since I was going to replace them anyway. Then I painted the chest dark brown. I tried to mix a lighter shade, but gave up.  Eventually, it turned out just right. When it was dry, I first gave it a coat of mahogny stain and then a coat of varnish.

 

For handles, I took pieces of an old ankle chain. 

 

If you think it was a h-ll of a job to take it apart and assemble again, it was. Whether you think it was worthwhile is for you to judge: 

The decorations in the middle come from another chain. The difference between before and after is obvious. But I have also taken a picture of my old chest of drawers, which was among the very first pieces of furniture I made, seven years ago. I have learned a lot since then although it wasn't that bad for a beginner.

But now, with a mix of nostalgia and guilt, I have replaced my old piece: 

It is perhaps not as elegant as the Georgian chest made from kit, but I am still very pleased with it.

Frames makeover

When I was looking for materials to use in the dressing table makover, I discovered some picture frames I had bought a long time ago in a charity shop. If you have followed my blog you may know that I like frames and have made all kinds in different techniques, from lolly sticks, and various recyclables, and more, and I have also done some makeovers. The frames I have found are not particularly imaginative. Someone started painting them and gave up.

But they are a very good starting point for a makeover. For the first frame, I just added another, outer frame of small lolly sticks.

I then painted the whole thing gold and "aged" it by painting a thin coat of white and wiping it away immediately.

Plain and sober frame. But I wanted to do something more challenging, so I started by shaving off the outer and inner edges and sanding them for a softer, rounded effect. Then I added bits of grill sticks, shaved to produce a flat surface on one side. The frame on the left is the original for comparison.

I am very pleased with the result. I have four more frames and will need to think of four interesting ways of improving them.

 

Dressing table makeover

A couple of weeks ago one of my dollhouse groups started sharing pictures of their bargains from Poundland. I must admit that Poundland is not my prioritised shopping target, and since it moved from the shopping mall where I park when I visit my hairdresser I hadn't been there. But the bargains were too good and besides a challenge: I like making ugly things pretty. Not that they are really ugly, but not quite the furniture you put in your dollhouse and feel proud of.

As a first try, I made a seat for one of the chairs: 

I am not sure I am happy with the result, but I don't know yet where these chairs are going. 

My next attempt was a dressing table: 

There is nothing radically wrong with it, but it is plain. Plain things beg to be made over.

I made a dressing table for my Victorian house some time ago.

 

I still like it, but because of the clothes-peg legs it is larger than 1:12, and when I put a chair in front of it, it looked ridiculous. And anyway, it was time to make something new. I like the ornate mirror, so I decided to keep it. As I was looking for a suitable contraption to fix the mirror, I found a plastic ice-cream spoon. If you think it's a strange way of fixing a mirror on a dressing table, let me tell you that my genuine eighteenth-century dressing table is made exactly like this (although admittedly not with a plastic spoon).

Then I painted the table ivory-white, and just to show how a tiny detail makes a difference, here are pictures of before and after I added a length of lace on the front:

Here it is now in its interior, and the scale is right to go with the chair. The perfume bottles, by the way, are made of beads.

Waiting for the dream

I haven't done anything miniature-related for a long time, and that for a reason.

For several years now, I have been promising myself that when I retire I will get a huge dollhouse that I will build from scratch, according to the rules, in correct scale, with all details, and keep doing it for the rest of my life.

I even found the house I wanted. Here it is. Dream big.

About six weeks ago I had my old childhood friend visiting, and I wanted to show her my dream in an online shop. And it wasn't there! My dream house wasn't available any more, and the dream got shattered in millions of shards. I quickly started telling my friend about something else, but later I went online again and checked. The house was gone. And I had been so stupid that I hadn't even remembered what it was called.

I found it on ebay of course. But the incident got me thinking. Why am I waiting for retirement, which is still quite a few years away, and with my usual optimism I always say that we may all be dead by then. Why not get it now and start working on it and let it take the time it takes. A dollhouse is never finished. Why not have all the joy now rather than some other time which may never come.

My friend supported me. My daughter supported me. My husband supported me. My dollhouse group supported me. (You see, I know where to seek support).

It is undeniably a very expensive toy. But I know I spend significantly more on my miniature projects every year, so it is just a matter of paying it all at once.

Anyway, I bought it!

For a couple of days I was the happy future owner of the dream house. Then I ran out of luck. The delivery was delayed... and delayed... and delayed... The seller emailed me with apologies, she even called me and promised to throw in some extras for my patience. I don't know whether it's a fraud, and if it is, I am not sure I have the energy to complain.

What happened, however, was that I lost interest in my current projects. It makes no sense to be doing anything small when a gigantic project is imminent - or maybe not. I know this is totally irrational, and I am sure I will still do other projects if the Dream House arrives one day. And yet...

Today is my first free weekend in ages, and it's raining, therefore perfect time for miniatures. See next post for what I have made.

Easter scene

I wanted to make an Easter scene with some typical Russian Easter food, which is saffron bread and spiced cottage cheese. These were easily made from air-drying clay. I painted the bread with watercolours, and I decorated the typical pyramid of cheese with black pepper that is supposed to be raisins. So far so good, but then I needed some painted eggs. My first idea was to take miniature eggs that I use to decorate the Easter tree:

You would think that they are small enough, but when I arranged them around the bread they looked enormous. Now, I know what while I can make bread and some other things from clay, I would never manage to make a credible egg, still less a dozen credible eggs of the same size. So I started looking around for something to recycle. In my Victorian kitchen, I have a basket of eggs which are codliver-oil pills (scroll to the bottom of the post for a close-up). Strangely, I have never since found pills in his shape, so I was a bit reluctant to take them, but the desire to have an Easter scene was strong.

I left the paints, brush and scissors in the picture for scale. Watercolours didn't stick on the coated pills so I used water-based acrylic and varnish. I also tried to paint some patterns with a gold pen, but it didn't look as good as I wanted it so I decided that simple was best. (Maybe next year I will make something more advanced).

Here I have set the table for Easter breakfast.

I decided to allow my English dolls to have a Russian Easter breakfast. So far they have only had English tea.